3201
Earth
An explosion reverberated through
the valley.
The figure lying under the thick
thermal rug jerked suddenly awake, scouring the hillside around him. Darting
upwards, his eyes followed the path of a beige lighter craft as it descended
behind a low hill in the distance. The ships tracer trails lingered behind it
for a few seconds, before slowing fading out of existence. Its rapid rise from
stratospheric to normal jetting speeds had created the sonic boom which had
awoken the man. He hadn’t spied any markings from this distance, but Earth saw
little to no interplanetary activity outside the E.R.C.O, so he sized the craft
was there’s. Pulling the blanket off himself, he stood. Having slept fully
clothed, he proceeded to unfurl the thick poncho he had wrapped around himself
in his sleep. Stepping into his boots, he bent to tighten their elastics, and
picking up a cowl draped over the weighty rucksack he had used as a pillow, he
covered his shaven head from the sun above.
As he busied himself with breakfast
and preparations for the day, the poncho rattled and clattered as he moved
around his makeshift camp. To a spectator from afar, the garment resembled a
greyed urban camouflage, or a tessellating piece of tactile electronic art.
Drawing closer, the patterns discerned themselves into a collection of tiny
rectangles of varying sizes. Some hung as large as a palm, others smaller than
a fingernail. The plates overlapped seamlessly, to such an extent than the
material beneath was invisible. It resembled a haphazard chainmail, steel of
antiquity or carbonfibre of today.
The camp reorganised and stowed in
his pack, the man hoisted it upon his shoulders and grasped a staff he had laid
carefully by his bed the night before. The staff mimicked his poncho, a long
train of cubes of differing sizes, but all connected into one another. Near the
staffs head, thick and thin wires wove together into a hairball mess. Using the
staff to steady himself, the man slowly descended from the ridge where he had
slept. He stumbled only once, but caught himself on a rocky outcrop behind him.
Eventually reaching the scarcely visible road beneath him, he continued his
journey southward. The old tarmac creaked and groaned underfoot, complaining
against the careful steps. Several times the whine rose to a roar as large
chunks were dislodged and threw themselves into the valley below. It didn’t
faze the walker though. He had made this journey countless times before, and
the road begrudged him passage every time. With his spare hand, he fidgeted
with one of the smaller plates adorning his garment. Twisting it between
fingers, gentle not to pull it from its clasp. His mind wandered. Six hundred years. Over six hundred years it had been kept a secret.
For a hundred years after the war, searches were made with effort. Teams and
drones ransacked the still breathing cities and buried the dead ones. After
then, their enemies relaxed the hunt, realizing their wartime allies were
peacetime foes. Foreign eyes left the Earth to be left in peace and pieces.
2894. It was a Martian
astrobattleship which launched the spear that struck the Gutenberg-Alexandrite
Library City of Europa. No other datastore was left untouched, as drone and
zealot alike rushed over the crippled Earth. Fragile intelligence was overrun
by violent ignorance. In a matter of hours, every city felt the blow of the
astrospears, while the slaved Ceresian AIs wrought destruction on the intranets
webwide. The last bear was crushed under a Martian landing craft in Brazil. The
last fern was vaporized and smoked by a Titaness mercenary as she triumphantly
waved at a cameradrone. But one does not extinguish a flame so easily. Mere
minutes after the munity of the moon disabled Earths defensive satellite
network, the EarthGov met for one final time. As the combined ships of the
Defiant Movement slowed into Earthen near space, rushed decisions were made. As
the meeting drew to a close, almost half the data on the planet had already
been copied. By the time the Unpronounceable General and his Ceresian court
entered the atmosphere, the entirety of the planets data was safely copied and
being printed onto memdrives. Flashcards were hurriedly inserted into ports,
while memory sticks were brandished ecstatically at image banks. It’s rumoured
even a hard copy disk was taken out of storage and re-digitized. As the Unpronounceable
General and a Martian Leejun entered the Office City of Brussels, wading
through the ice water which writhed in the streets, the EarthGov was quite
calm. Peace was signed within the hour, over the tumultuous clamour the crowds
outside. As the fire of the astrospears peaked the horizon apocalyptically and
intranet implants were torn out to screams and nosebleeds, the last EarthGov
president felt warmth in his heart. But not for long.
The slaved AIs picked up the
intranet ping trail within minutes, and messages ordering the mass data
reproduction were decoded in the fleet command centres above. The
Unpronounceable General’s rage saw the last president and his congress die
feeling their throats boil. But with their last petaflops the loyal Earthen AIs
managed to mask the location of the transcription from the invaders, before
succumbing to cessation themselves. So when the first nomad left his burning
city and strode out into the wilderness, he knew that the knowledge he carried
in his garment was safe from the barbarians above. Weaved into the poncho he wore
under thin rags and plasfilms, was all the knowledge left of the planet. The
EarthGov knew they had lost the war. A century of hubris had seen to that.
Cities and fortresses fell, their allies too far and weak to help. The last
remaining super-AIs were bargaining with the enemy for exile beyond the
wormhole. There were no option left but to hide. It was the idea of one
official who lay now clutching their microwaved jugular in the Brusselèèr
Office City, to hide in the people themselves.
And it worked. The septillions upon
septillions of bytes of data were woven into inconspicuousness. As the first
wearer of the poncho settled down in a newborn shantytown on the southern coast
of a forgotten coast, the knowledge was hidden from prying eyes. They were
visited thrice by search parties in the first year. But nothing was found. When
the first nomad’s third grandchild saw the occupation end nearly ninety years
later, the treasures remained safe. The Castillo cave paintings. The works of
Mozart, Boucher and Unchu. The social media trends from the three hundred major
neural forum sites from 2200 until 2894. The full 3D scans of Prague, Tasmania
and Beijing. Photos of every human who had ever lived since 2078, and genome
sequences from 2162, both excluding deliberate outliers. The all-powerful entanglement
“frequency” of the induced wormhole, which had sealed itself shut after the
last AI carrier craft passed through. All this information, culture, wisdom and
history was safe. Hidden and forgotten.
The man who walked the road along
the mountainside stopped fidgeting with the memdrive between his fingers and
brought his hand up to shield his eyes from the shimmering sun. These thoughts
of history were racing through his mind, but these emotions of loss drifted
from one subject to another. The words his mother had spoken to him when his
father grew bleeding were harsh but true. The weight and burden was forced onto
his shoulders but he carried it dutifully. He scarcely remembered his mother’s
face, yet he remembered events from six hundred and fifty years ago which he’d
never lived. But the present was pressing. Squinting, he could make out the
shattered shafts of Santiago touching the heavens in the distance. The Orosh
had passed, but the dust storms still whipped up the air around the city into a
thin fog visible kilometres away. Closer to him, alongside the young river
birthed last year by an earthquake, lay a Neuvo Santiago. Smoke rose from a few
houses, and a smile broke the man’s face.
“She still lives then.” He murmured quietly for nobody to hear.
Tightening his packs claps
with a yank, and continued down the road towards the fresh settlement. He was
the twenty sixth wearer of knowledge. His name was John Nino.
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